Engagement Marketing Can Change the Way You Sell! by Larry Dillon, CEO Engagement marketing has become a critical tool in helping companies magnify their sales. At InsightPRM, we have seen companies grow from a few hundred clients to over 500,000 in less than 10 years using these simple techniques. What is engagement marketing? Let me answer that in a roundabout way. We recently surveyed 1000 businesses in North America and Europe—everything from banking to IT Services. We asked them to state the value most important to buyers today. The number 2 response was Price, but the number 1 response was Trust—maybe not so surprising in today’s information-packed marketplace. In an age when you can find out everything you need to know about a company in a few minutes online, trust may be hard to establish and easy to lose. Building trust may therefore be the most significant cornerstone of modern marketing and sales. Are the most successful companies today asking, “How can we help our clients?” or are they wondering, “How can we make more money?” As focuses shift, opportunities to build trust may be lost. If you are not surprising, amazing and delighting your customers and prospects, your competitors might be. Why not build trust by offering something of value to your prospects for free? By providing useful information, you can save your prospects time and money, assist them in growing their business, or help them to avoid typical mistakes that companies make when purchasing or deploying your services. […]

What we’re reading: Leveraging LinkedIn for Business Development

The book:
Leveraging LinkedIn for Business Development
By Brynne Tillman and Lisa Peskin

Why you need it: When you’re mining for prospects, LinkedIn is often your best source to reach a key decision maker who may need your product or service. Many companies don’t know how to use LinkedIn to drive sales, but this guide (written by the founders of Business Development University) will take you to school.

Why we like it: This down-to-earth guide + workbook tells us step by step how to turn a weak LinkedIn presence into a valuable sales strategy. It’s great for new and experienced social media users alike.

What we learned: LinkedIn works best if you start nurturing connections when you don’t really need them. When the time comes to look for a job or pitch your new product, you’ll have a supportive network.